Final Performance
by 100Percent Shipper
Summary: One-shot. Allie is dying and Bea is about to kill the Freak.


I am Bea Smith. A survivor of domestic violence, a mother, a lover, former top-dog of Wentworth. A murderer.

The muffled sounds of inmates drift through the cracks of my cell door. I sit on the bed, my legs propped up, my arms resting heavy on my knees and I look through the bars of the window at the blue sky. In my forefinger and thumb I clasp a razor.

Breath in, breath out. If I don't move, everything will be okay.

I'm tracing the story of my life in the clouds. I'm remembering my arrival at Wentworth, bruises still fading from Al's knuckles, the caustic sound of his voice like a noose over my better senses, strangling me. I arrived here and I was scared, but mostly I was angry. It was a quiet, steely anger, it coursed through my veins and made my blood taste like metal.

I remember the brutality of this place in those first weeks. It stripped away these walls I'd hidden behind my whole life. It wasn't pretty, what surfaced.

I gave full expression to it, in here. I can't lie. A part of me reveled in letting it out. When I plunged that pen into Jack's neck, when I put a bullet in Holtz's brain it was for Debbie's death but also for every time Al had hit me, raped me and bullied me into submission. It was retribution for a universe so deeply callous. I never would have dreamed of doing such things before Wentworth. It changed me, this place. In moments like this I wonder if who I've become is who I really am or if it's just a reflection of the circumstances I've lived through. I can't tease the two apart because, looking at my life, the circumstances thrust on me made choice impossible. I'd done the only thing I knew to do. So it's pointless to wonder - what if I'd left him when he first hit me, or the second or the third? Or any time in the intervening years before I found myself cloistered in these concrete wall cells. What if I'd accepted the offer of protection and lagged after my first beating here? What if I'd kept my head down and avoided Jacks? What if I hadn't put a bullet into Holtz's frontal lobe?

All pointless questions because tracing my story in the clouds makes me see the inevitability of it all. Wentworth made me see myself clearly for the first time. I liked the power, the chance to feel in control for once. What an ugly truth that now seems to me, but in some strange way I've felt more free inside than I ever did out there. And it was a rush, you know and the rush was like a wave that carried me up until I was top dog. But it also made the metal in my blood become brittle that I fractured on the inside. It was an empty victory made at the expense of those I loved, including myself and all I was left with was more anger at a fate that masqueraded as choice, which had manipulated me into losing everything

I'm impotent to stop the wave crashing down now.

Allie had been the one glimmer of hope. She'd suffused herself into my world and she's suffered the curse of my love. Allie the angel of mercy amidst this fiery hell. She'd peeled away what this life had made of me and behind it I had glimpsed deeper within myself something … good. Something worth being, something worth living for.

Allie with her warm hands that anchored me to a new reality that I desperately wanted to live in, with her. Allie who saw me in my totality and loved me when I didn't even know that I deserved something so beautiful but now that I've tasted what that feels like, there is no going back. Within her touch was the promise of some sort of peace. Some sort of healing. Some sort of joy. I know that I will never find what we had again. It was too precious, too rare. She lies at death's door and so does my heart.

So I'm desperately looking for clouds because that is all I have now. That and a lifetime of looking at them framed by barbed wire fences. It's an eternity of boredom, time to think too many things and know that I can do nothing to escape the vile pettiness of this place. It's time to settle in amongst the shrapnel pieces of my soul and cut myself on years of loneliness as my friends leave me. How many more terrible choices will I be forced to take? How much more of myself will I be forced to loose to the slate grey walls of Wentworth?

Breath in, breath out. No. Years will not do. I won't be apart from my girls that long. And perhaps it is once more fate masked as choice but I will take it. If I'm crashing, then at least let me crash and burn for a reason.

I drop the razor from between my fingers because I see what I need to do.

It's not just about revenge this time, it's about doing the right thing. It's about stopping a woman so broken that she poisons everything she touches. She can't be allowed to continue and it's clear I am the only one who can do this. I've been manipulated precisely to this point. I've been flayed by circumstances so I would be raw and ready for this final performance. This performance will be my absolution. In this final act, I will set myself free.

I put away the razor. I open the door and step into rumble of the prison and head for the Governor's office. My stride is assured, my face unreadable.

I am Bea Smith. I have one final job to do.


End file.
